


Changes

by jiokra



Category: Handsome Devil (2016)
Genre: First Kiss, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-05 00:11:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12782652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jiokra/pseuds/jiokra
Summary: Conor clutched him tighter, and even as everyone started to jump and bellow directly into his ear, Ned didn’t care. A thrill shuddered along his spine, and he thought,It’s a good thing I’m expelled. Or else being roommates might be a problem.





	Changes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alasse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alasse/gifts).



Ned’s brain grew dizzy from watching the bizarrely shaped ball get tossed and kicked across a field—the appeal of rugby still eluded him—but the energy from the game had him vibrating till he became numb to everything but that ball. He couldn’t feel the cold biting at his ears or the heat from wearing a jersey over his jacket. He’d known Conor excelled at rugby, but he barely recognized him now. The commentator shouted his name from the loudspeaker as if he were a local legend. An otherworldly sensation swelled in Ned’s chest, and he could have sworn it was pride—for a rugby player.

When the game ended, all he wanted was to hug that rugby player. He didn’t think before he bolted down to the field.

Once Conor and his sweat soaked uniform were in Ned’s arms, the spark of adrenaline that inspired Ned to race from the bleachers and onto the field was reignited tenfold. And the moment they touched, he could’ve sworn he felt Conor zap through him.

Conor laughed and babbled about the various plays, screaming right in Ned’s ear. The rugby talk went clear over Ned’s head, but he understood the sentiment and felt the physical evidence of it: Conor’s sweat soaked jersey, hot from all that running, kicking, tackling, and the heart that fought to punch through it.

Conor stopped screaming and just held onto Ned, and soon enough Ned began to understand the appeal of rugby.

He wondered what would happen if he crept back, looked into Conor’s endorphin drunk gaze, and didn’t look away even when it grew awkward.

But then mindless zombies, lifeforms otherwise known as rugby players, crashed into them.

Ned ought to mind. But then Conor clutched him tighter, and even as everyone started to jump and bellow directly into his ear, Ned didn’t care. A thrill shuddered along his spine, and he thought, _It’s a good thing I’m expelled. Or else being roommates might be a problem._

* * *

Two-hundred fifty-two million years ago, long after a nefarious planet collided into a naïve, juvenile Earth, the thread of life vibrated in a single cell bacteria that evolved into a vibrant ecosystem that encountered its first hurdle on the intrepid course to paradise: Glaciers. Sadistic, impartial. Capable of shoving rocks the size of buses across thousands of miles. Hell bent on a polar voyage, blocks of ice plowed over foliage, mountain ranges, oceans, and continents, sucking out the soul of Earth’s _raison d’etre_. Ninety-nine per cent of marine life, plants, perhaps the distant cousins of the renowned feathered reptiles—Ned could not be certain as he stayed awake during that lecture out of fear of the Headmaster’s reprimand—died as a result of desalinated, rock hard water. Death covered all corners of the Earth, the lucky few survivors awakening to a new beginning borne from endless carnage.

The Permian-Triassic extinction event. Or, as the savvy folk thought of it, the Great Dying.

As Ned flattened the edge of his beloved bikini clad poster, just beneath the masterpiece of the two lads kissing as if it were their last before the glaciers came, he knew from the core of his essence, whatever shriveled, blackened part of his soul remained, that the plight of the one percent who survived the Great Dying lived on in his room, the very room he inhabited at Wood Hill, with Conor.

Extinction wasn’t dissimilar from expulsion, Ned thought. And surviving either calamity bore unrivaled parallels.

The door snapped open, and Ned swung around so fast, he tore off the edge of the bikini poster.

And that was how Conor and he greeted themselves a second time as roommates.

Conor glanced at the posters, the crowded walls so at odds with the white blank expanse of his side of the room. He smiled, and looked Ned straight on. "Want to study in the library?"

He'd missed Conor so much, just those moments with the two of them alone saying nothing as they drilled and crammed for classes. He jumped off the bed, ankle landing at a angle, and he hopped to a stand. "That’s—" His tongue felt too large for his mouth. "Grand.”

* * *

It wasn’t grand.

After Conor’s winning kick as they embraced on the field, avoiding touch was impossible. They clung as they were smashed together, Conor’s pulse loud in his ear. Then there was the crackling energy that inspired the team to score over twenty points in the final half of the game. Its static had clung to them even then, and perhaps it was that pull which kept them entwined, not their grip or the other boys shoving and jumping.

But now in the library, avoiding touch was not only possible, it was the neutral state of affairs, the unspoken rule. A leaf of paper might be led astray, corners slipping over a notebook, followed shortly by a pencil rolling by—but nothing more than that. Their fingers might graze while pointing out pivotal passages from a book, or while passing an eraser, an elbow skirting the limits of one’s territory—but _certainly_ nothing more than that.

And yet the vacant, constant sliver of air that separated them crackled. Static raised the hairs along Ned’s arm, and an itch niggled at him to lean down on his elbow, the weight of his head pushing his arm past the invisible Berlin Wall and into Conor’s zone.

Conor bent toward him now, and Ned froze. “Do you understand this?” he said, waving a pencil over lines of sine.

Ned’s eyes glossed over all of the fractions and instances of pi. The hushed, uneven whisper of mathematics into his ear did little to dispel the crackling electricity between them.

“It’s like a sound wave,” he said, waffling up a response. Conor’s breathing had a little hitch in it, a cadence to it. His ears zeroed in on all the nuances.

“A sound wave.” Conor hummed before huddling back over his homework. “Thanks.”

Ned nodded, figuring it best not to speak.

He once had a bright future upon the horizon of possible expulsion, beggarhood, degeneracy. He hadn’t contemplated the future beyond avoiding the people who bullied him for the perception of being gay. How did others handle remaining and trying to uphold some kind of status quo? The crackle and static grew too tempting, and he welcomed a glance at Conor’s hands. Dirt lined the edges of his nails, from rugby likely. Tendons pulled as he scribbled sinusoidal nonsense. Had his hair always been such an understated golden brown?

Ned closed his eyes, imagining hyperbolas.

He liked him. He liked Conor. His roommate—his _friend_.

He wasn’t entirely sure, as they both had spoken in riddles, but their conversation on Conor’s boat led him to believe it might not be entirely unrequited. But to confirm would involve broaching the topic, and the possibility for misinterpretation was great.

Expulsion grew alluring again.

He needed a breather.

He jolted up to a stand, chair screeching back.

Conor glanced up.

“I need the loo,” said Ned.

Conor flittered his pencil between his fingers, waving it so fast it disappeared. “Have fun.”

Ned nodded curtly. “I will.”

Once out of sight between shelves of musty hardcovers, Ned threw back his head and let out an aggrieved sigh. He could _talk_ to Conor. If he could sing solo on a stage and fail at punching Weasel in the face, he could handle a crush on his best mate.

“Ned?”

Petrified, Ned looked out of the corner of his eye, where a boy he recognized from Physics stood before him. “Hey.”

The boy stepped closer. “Conor with you?”

“He’s with me.”

“I wanted to talk to him. Do you mind staying here until I’m done?”

Ned dropped a hand to scratch the back of his head. “Sure? I’m going to the loo anyway.” He said it with such earnest that he almost believed himself.

Without a goodbye, the boy shouldered past him and left. Ned counted down from five before he ducked to peer over books and watch as the boy approached Conor. He couldn’t hear anything, but there was something just so bizarre about the conversation that he couldn’t resist the temptation to gawk.

Soon Conor noticed the boy.

His strides grew assertive, a bit poised, and when Conor’s gaze whisked down, the movement tracked slow, and even slower when rising back up to meet the guy’s eye. Ned shifted and ignored the boy’s height, his dusty blond hair. Ned deleted from memory how he’d looked like from the front. The boy halted by perching his hip at the edge of the table, resting his palm flat along the surface.

A few seconds later Conor cracked a smile, shaking his head to hide the brightness that sprung to his cheeks. Conor fiddled with his pencil, waving it faster than before, enough that it might be flung out of his hand.

A train wreck devolved before Ned’s eyes.

Laughter came down the aisle. Startled, Ned slipped away from the shelves before he could be seen.

* * *

He wound up going to the bathroom to prevent himself from committing an irreversible, idiotic act. Though he didn’t know what said act would entail, he had the sinking impression that he might give it his all, nevertheless. Call it personal growth, a heightened self-awareness of his impulsive, dumb tendencies.

When he sauntered back to their table, a solitary Conor was enraptured by his textbook. Yet when Ned sat down, he noticed Conor wasn’t reading, merely gazing vacantly at the page. He waved a hand in front of Conor’s eyes, but this went unnoticed. Annoyed, he bit out, “Conor.”

Conor jolted. Then those brown eyes turned to Ned. “He asked me out.”

Ned felt needles pricking him. “What?”

“I said no.”

“Said no to what?”

“He asked to have lunch together and kick a football around.”

“Football?”

Conor fell back into his chair, pencil slipping out of his hand and rolling beneath the desk

“Why’d you say no?”

Conor clenched his cheek, accentuating his jawline. Ned watched it intently for a moment before catching himself.

“Why wouldn’t I say no?” said Conor.

Ned tried processing this, but then he kept thinking back to Conor asking Ned to come to the game because he wanted him to come, needed him to come, and then he remembered being both freezing cold and sweating beneath that jersey layered over his jacket. His throat had gone hoarse because he’d never cheered that loud for anything in his life, certainly not rugby. The Wood Hill rugby team had the life crushed out of him, but Conor was the only one he noticed.

Ned wondered what would have happened if no one else had been on the field. If Ned ran into him, and Conor hadn’t just embraced him, but they kissed under starlight for all the world and none of its inhabitants to see.

“You should do it,” said Ned, aghast at himself but unable to stop. “You earned it.”

“I earned it?”

“You of all people deserve a break.”

Conor trespassed across the invisible Berlin Wall between them, balancing himself by resting his palm on the table, just over Ned’s homework. On reflex, Ned leaned back, but not far enough. Conor surrounded him, and with him this close, the scent of fresh laundry, soap, and grass filled up his nose until his head was swimming, enthralled by how good Conor smelled. He swallowed, glancing down briefly at Conor’s mouth, at the little bow and the flush swell beneath it.

“I’m not going with him,” said Conor.

“You’re not?”

“No.”

He wondered if he ought to move. “Why not?”

They were so close that Ned noticed light freckles dusting Conor’s cheeks. But then Conor rolled his eyes and turned back to his books.

It might have been a wall before, but now it was a mote of burning oil. Ned crossed it and felt the burn in his cheeks. “Why not?” he asked.

Conor grabbed a pencil and hunched over his textbook, back turned to Ned.

Heart racing, Ned resisted the urge to grab his shoulder and shove him back around. “Conor, why not?”

_Tap, tap, tap._

A teacher stood at the edge of their table, an evil eye trained on Ned.

Defeated, Ned tabled the topic as Conor has so readily done and forced himself to focus on mathematics.

* * *

They didn’t speak much after that other than to ask for clarification about a homework exercise. It was nauseatingly boring, and Ned kept feeling an itch niggling away at him to round up on Conor and ask what he’d meant. Studying became a herculean effort when all he could think about was how Conor had managed to corner Ned on that table and render him a bewildering tangle of nerves and confusion.

They left before they were the last people in the library, too proud to become the last stragglers. With the lingering silence between them thick with what was left unsaid, the empty corridors stretched on into infinity.

Ned glanced over at Conor and noted the exhaustion draining him, the little splotches of purple beneath his eyes and the unkempt state of his hair from just living out the motions of the day. Well aware of his staring, Ned wrestled with himself to look away, but then Conor glanced over at him. Discovered, Ned smiled sheepishly.

Conor shook his head and tapped shoulders with him. “I want to show you something.”

He jogged down the corridor toward some doors leading outside the school building. He spun around, jogging backwards the remaining distance. “Ned!”

It was a little exciting, the idea of running out into the night past curfew, breaking some other school rule that Ned had put on his bucket list of dream violations to earn himself expulsion.

“ _Ned_!”

“All right, all right. Heard you the first time.”

He refused to run—he always managed to look like an idiot when running outside of a gymnastic  environment—so he hitched up his walking pace, a slight limp as he fought to maintain the speedy walk while not verging on the edge of running.

* * *

Conor led him through a courtyard, past that sacred place where they practiced their song, where Conor had once shoved him, and after another detour across a grassy hill with the rugby field in view, they arrived to their destination.

“You brought me to a human sized Petri dish,” said Ned dryly, as Conor led him into the locker room.

He left Ned at the door and strode down an aisle before arriving at his locker. “We missed dinner.”

“I distinctly remember having a hearty, full bellied meal. In fact, I also remember you next to me.”

“Second dinner then.” Conor’s locker snapped open, and he grinned, snatching out a jersey and tossing it over his shoulder.

Without preamble he chucked something at Ned, who startled and flung out both arms to catch it—and he would have caught it, had there been warning. He was certain of it. But as it was, the object evaded his grasp and collided with his wrist, unceremoniously rolling off him.

A power bar settled just between his shoes. “You’re serious?” said Ned.

The locker slammed shut. Conor’s strides took him to Ned in the surest path, and Ned took a moment to admire his thighs before snapping out of it and bending over to retrieve the power bar. Conor halted before him, feet shoulder width apart, and as Ned came back up, he checked him out without realizing it.

Conor wasn’t smiling at him, but his gaze didn’t look too untoward. Ned thought back to the boy in the library. His chest ached. Then Conor tapped the rugby ball in his hand. All that sadness vanished.

Ned stepped away.

“It’s only rugby,” said Conor.

“I know! That’s the crux of it.”

Conor needled him with the ball, giving a him a little shove out the door, but every step Ned took was stiff and defensive as he fought to stay put. Conor’s lip upturned into the hint of a smile, and Ned felt himself grinning.

“Do you know how to play?” said Conor.

“All I know is you tackle the lad with the ball. I have a hunch you’ll have it a lot.”

Conor pressed the ball harder against him. “Then I’ll just make sure you tackle me after the goal line.”

Conor’s gaze wavered between watching what lied behind Ned’s back and flickering back to him. Ned kept glancing away whenever he was caught staring, but he was addicted to seeing how long he could go admiring Conor without getting caught, especially now when they were so close.

His back collided hard against a door.

Hissing, Ned slapped a hand to the back of his head. Conor muttered out a curse and an apology, a hand slipping around him and opening the door. Crisp air cooled down the burn in the back of his head like a salve. Conor held his shoulder, hand sliding down his arm and lingering at his elbow. He didn’t step around Ned but pressed into him, the rugby ball kept in place not by his grasp but their chests pressed together.

As Ned stumbled out the door, he glanced at the grand old thing, and thanked it. He’d never been so grateful to this school.

* * *

“Fuck’s sake, Ned. You hit the _ball_ with your foot.”

Grass settled back to the ground, having been hit hard after Ned’s blown attempt at kicking the rugby ball. “It’s harder than it looks,” said Ned, and, feeling a little petty, spat out, “If you going to be smug about it, do it properly and put my leg into position.”

“Fine.”

Ned froze. He hadn’t expected that.

Conor came around in front of him and grabbed his thigh, shoving it back a step. He bent down and grabbed the ball, giving Ned a nice view of his back stretching out.

Ned’s mouth fired off again. “What if that lad in the library sees?”

Conor grabbed his ankle, his fingers peeking a little past the cuff of his trousers and sending a little jolt through him. “Who cares?”

“I think he’d care.”

“Well, I don’t. He can just deal with it.” Conor stood up, his eyes a little fiery. “I told you. I don’t want to date him.”

“Why not?” Ned didn’t expect any particular answer in response. He toyed with the sleeves of his jacket, hating how small and pitiful he sounded.

“Because—” Conor shook his head. “I’m not even friends with him. I don’t know him.”

“Friendship isn’t necessarily a prelude to love.” Ned avoided him as he bent down to snatch the rugby ball, placing the ball where he vaguely remembered Conor instructed him.

“Ned—”

Ignoring him, Ned swung back his leg and whacked it at ball, hitting nothing but grass again.

“Ned!” Conor planted his hands on Ned’s shoulders.

Just like that night on the field after the greatest match of the season, they stood in the massive field with its tame, pristine grass, the fine lines demarcating the various zones and boundaries. Except the only difference between that final match and now was the total privacy. In this moment, if Conor were so inclined, they could hold each other tighter that before, kiss as if glaciers were coming for them. He tried to catch Conor’s eyes, but it was an uncharted venture to lock eyes with him when only a breath of space separated them. All Ned could think about was closing that distance, breaking down that final wall.

Once he thought that, a little old song sprang to Ned’s mind, but he only caught a few notes of the chorus. Just when he thought he remembered a lyric or one extra note, his brain switched to a pop song that the rugby players blasted after practice that day. Ned had sat on the bleeding seats at the last possible slip of space on the row before the aisle, the farthest seat imaginable from the field.

He still didn’t quite understand the appeal of rugby, but he did understand the appeal of rugby players. So he watched, he could admit that. And during that pop song, he remembered a guy punching Conor’s shoulder, and Conor punching him back, and before the rational mind could process it, both of them had collapsed onto the grass, rising for push up after push up as the other boys congregated around them and shouted expletives.

“Ned, what are you thinking so hard about?” said Conor now, softly.

“Would you believe it,” Ned replied conversationally, though his heart rammed against his chest, pulse beating in his ears, “if I said kissing you? In the gayest interpretation of the word.”

“Like this?”

Conor stepped closer and kissed him.

It didn’t last very long, and Ned’s head spun too much to kiss back or process what was happening. He’d never been kissed before, not believing it’d ever happen at Wood Hill. All too soon Conor broke away.

He bent back down and grabbed Ned’s foot, shoving it into position. He stepped back and crossed his arms. “Now kick.”

Lightheaded, Ned stumbled back. “Excuse me?”

“The—the ball, Ned.”

“No, I mean—what was _that_?”

Conor snatched the ball and stuffed it under his arm. “What do you think it was?”

“I’m not entirely qualified to judge, but I think a piss poor kiss.”

Scoffing, Conor tossed the ball and charged at him, as though he meant to tackle him. Ned felt a little flicker in his stomach.

Conor held both Ned’s cheeks, keeping him still and rooted where he was. Conor tilted his head just so and kissed Ned again—pressed harder, surer, wetter. Ned’s head spun, his cheeks and neck and lips on fire from Conor’s touch, but instead of standing there dumbly as Conor kissed him, his instincts fired up, and he kissed back. He grasped fistfuls of Conor’s shirt, tugging him closer, and they stumbled. Conor pulled Ned against him and recalibrated their balance. (Another reason to hate the game but love the players, Ned realized.) The kiss grew feverish as time went on. He didn’t know who started it, but suddenly a tongue flirted with Ned’s lips and beckoned them open. A bolt of lightning singed him down south. He tugged Conor closer, destroying that careful sense of balance.

They only stopped once their lungs burned for air.

As they caught their breaths, Ned said, “Want to go back to the room?”

Conor swallowed, nodding. “Fine.”

In silence, they looked down at the ball.

Ned let out a little laugh, breaking the awkward silence, and they looked at each other, really looked at each other, and everything started to feel right for the first time since that rally.


End file.
